All That Glitters
This is really Commander Vandenburg's story, but he is too many
millions of miles away to tell it. It concerns his geophysicist, Dr.
Paynter, who was generally believed to have gone to the moon to get
away from his wife.
At one time or other, we were all supposed (often by our wives) to have
done just that.
However, in Paynter's case, there was just enough truth to make it
stick.
It was not that he disliked his wife; one could almost say the
contrary. He would do anything for her, but unfortunately the things
that she wanted him to do cost rather too much. She was a lady of
extravagant tastes, and such ladies are advised not to marry scientists
even scientists who go to the moon.
Mrs. Paynter's weakness was for jewelry, particularly diamonds. As
might be expected, this was a weakness that caused her husband a good
deal of worry. Being a conscientious as well as an affectionate
husband, he did not merely worry about it he did something about it. He
became one of the world's leading experts on diamonds, from the
scientific rather than the commercial point of view, and probably knew
more about their composition, origin, and properties than any other man
alive. Unfortunately, you may know a lot about diamonds without ever
possessing any, and her husband's erudition was not something that Mrs.
Paynter could wear around her neck when she went to a party.
Geophysics, as I have mentioned, was Dr.
Paynter's real business; diamonds were merely a sideline. He had
developed many remarkable surveying instruments which could probe the
interior of the Earth by means of electric impulses and magnetic waves,
so giving a kind of X-ray picture of the hidden strata far below. It
was hardly surprising, therefore, that he was one of the men chosen to
pry into the mysterious interior of the moon.
He was quite eager to go, but it seemed to Commander Vandenburg that he
was reluctant to leave Earth at this particular moment. A number of
men had shown such symptoms; sometimes they were due to fears that
could not be eradicated, and an otherwise promising man had to be left
behind.
In Paynter's case, however, the reluctance was quite impersonal. He
was in the middle of a big experiment something he had been working on
all his life and he didn't want to leave Earth until it was finished.
However, the first lunar expedition could not wait for him, so he had
to leave his project in the hands of his assistants. He was
continually exchanging cryptic radio messages with them, to the great
annoyance of the signals section of Space Station Three.
In the wonder of a new world waiting to be explored, Paynter soon
forgot his earthly preoccupations. He would dash hither and yon over
the lunar landscape on one of the neat little electric scooters the
Americans had brought with them, carrying seismographs, magnetometers,
gravity meters, and all the other esoteric tools of the geophysicist's
trade. He was trying to learn, in a few weeks, what it had taken men
hundreds of years to discover about their own planet. It was true that
he had only a small sample of the moon's fourteen million square miles
of territory to explore, but he intended to make a thorough job of
it.
From time to time he continued to get messages from his colleagues back
on Earth, as well as brief but affectionate signals from Mrs. P.
Neither seemed to interest him very much; even when you are not so busy
that you hardly have time to sleep, a quarter of a million miles puts
most of your personal affairs in a different perspective. I think that
on the moon Dr. Paynter was really happy for the first time in his
life; if so, he was not the only one.
Not far from our base there was a rather fine crater pit, a great
blowhole in the lunar surface almost two miles from rim to rim. Though
it was fairly close at hand, it was outside the normal area of our
joint operations, and we had been on the moon for six weeks before
Paynter led a party of three men off in one of the baby tractors to
have a look at it. They disappeared from radio range over the edge of
the moon, but *e weren't worried about that because if they ran into
trouble they could always call Earth and get any message relayed back
to us.
Paynter and his men were gone forty-eight hours, which is about the
maximum for continuous working on the moon, even with booster drugs. At
first their little expedition was quite uneventful and therefore quite
unexciting;
everything went according to plan. They reached the crater, inflated
their pressurised igloo and unpacked their stores, took their
instrument readings, and then set up a portable drill to get core
samples. It was while he was waiting for the drill to bring him up a
nice section of the moon that Paynter made his second great discovery.
He had made his first about ten hours before, but he didn't know it
yet.
Around the lip of the crater, lying where they had been thrown up by
the great explosions that had convulsed the lunar landscape three
hundred million years before, were immense piles of rock which must
have come from many miles down in the moon's interior. Anything he
could do with his little drill, thought Paynter, could hardly compare
with this. Unfortunately, the mountain-sized geological specimens that
lay all around him were not neatly arranged in their correct order;
they had been scattered over the landscape, much farther than the eye
could see, according to the arbitrary violence of the eruptions that
had blasted them into space.
Paynter climbed over these immense slag heaps, taking a swing at likely
samples with his little hammer. Presently his colleagues heard him
yell, and saw him come running back to them carrying what appeared to
be a lump of rather poor quality glass. It was some time before he was
sufficiently coherent to explain what all the fuss was about and some
time later still before the expedition remembered its real job and got
back to work.
Vandenburg watched the returning party as it headed back to the ship.
The four men didn't seem as tired as one would have expected,
considering the fact that they had been on their feet for two days.
Indeed, there was a certain jauntiness about their movements which even
the space suits couldn't wholly conceal. You could see that the
expedition had been a success. In that case, Paynter would have two
causes for congratulation.
The priority message that had just come from Earth was very cryptic,
but it was clear that Paynter's work there whatever it was had finally
reached a triumphant conclusion.
Commander Vandenburg almost forgot the message when he saw what Paynter
was holding in his hand. He knew what a raw diamond looked like, and
this was the second largest that anyone had ever seen. Only the
Cullinan, tipping the scales at 3,026 carats, beat it by a slender
margin.
"We ought to have expected it," he heard Paynter babble happily.
"Diamonds are always found associated with volcanic vents. But somehow
I never thought the analogy would hold here."
Vandenburg suddenly remembered the signal, and handed it over to
Paynter. He read it quickly, and his jaw dropped. Never in his life,
Vandenburg told me, had he seen a man so instantly deflated by a
message of congratulation. The signal read:
WE'VE DONE IT. TEST 541 WITH MODIFIED
PRESSURE CONTAINER COMPLETE
SUCCESS. NO PRACTICAL LIMIT TO SIZE.
COSTS NEGLIGIBLE.
"What's the matter?" said Vandenburg, when he saw the stricken look on
Paynter's face. "it doesn't seem bad news to me, whatever it means."
Paynter gulped two or three times like a stranded fish, then stared
helplessly at the great crystal that almost filled the palm of his
hand. He tossed it into the air, and it Boated back in that
slow-motion way everything has under lunar gravity.
Finally he found his voice.
"My lab's been working for years," he said, "trying to synthesise
diamonds. Yesterday this thing was worth a million dollars. Today
it's worth a couple of hundred. I'm not sure I'll bother to carry it
back to Earth."
Well, he did carry it back; it seemed a pity not to. For about three
months, Mrs. P. had the finest diamond necklace in the world, worth
every bit of a thousand dollars mostly the cost of cutting and
polishing. Then the Paynter Process went into commercial production,
and a month later she got her divorce. The grounds were extreme mental
cruelty; and I suppose you could say it was justified.